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The Joy of Zadie Smith and Thomas Aquinas

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

What place does pleasure have in a good life? Should we, following Epicurus and John Stuart Mill, take maximal pleasure as our overriding goal? Or are there higher moral values that trump pleasure?

Has Smith’s life revealed to her that acting for pleasure is not rational?

In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books the writer Zadie Smith suggests that joy is essentially different from and humanly more important than pleasure. In her experience, pleasure is a part of daily life, particularly through “small pleasures” (she mentions eating and people-watching) that “go a long way” in giving her satisfaction. But joy is very different; it gives “not much pleasure at all” but is rather a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Nonetheless, in her life the joy of “true love” for her husband and child has become far more important than pleasure. It is, she says, “the only thing that makes [life] worthwhile.”

Smith’s discussion is thoroughly contemporary and hip, centered by a vivid autobiographical account of a club drug experience. But what she’s getting at resonates with a very different treatment of the topic: Thomas Aquinas’s in his “Summa Theologiae” (I-II, question 31, article 3, “Is Joy Altogether the Same Thing as Pleasure?” which I cite in the translation of my colleague, Fred Freddoso). Aquinas’ approach — systematic, abstract and tightly argued — is the polar opposite of Smith’s. But the two discussions are mutually illuminating.
Both agree that joy is something much more than the bodily pleasures that satisfy an animal. As Smith puts it, animals always “choose a pleasure over a joy.” Aquinas, agrees, though with a philosophical refinement: “We do not attribute joy to brute animals”—it’s not quite that animals choose pleasure over joy; there’s no choice because they are incapable of experiencing joy in the sense that humans do.

But why is joy distinctively human? Smith seems uninterested in such metaphysical questions. Joy is a vivid and fundamental feature of her life, but “it’s no good thinking about or discussing it.” Aquinas, however, is ready with an answer: pleasures satisfy just some bodily desire (for food, sex, warmth); joy satisfies our desire to live according to our rational nature. “Sometimes one feels some bodily pleasure and yet does not rejoice in this according to reason.”

But it’s not clear that Smith entirely avoids Aquinas’s line of thought. Reflecting on her drug-induced “joy” at a London club, she concludes that it was more a “mimicking” of joy. It captured an essential joyous feature: “the feeling. . . that the experiencing subject has somehow ‘entered’ the emotion and disappeared.” Pleasure, by contrast, is something “I have . . . a feeling I want to experience and own,” like that produced by a “beach holiday” or a “new dress.” But the day after showed that the drug-high was not real joy — not so much because of the physical hangover but because the events experienced as supremely meaningful turned out, “in the harsh light of the morning,” to have “no substance whatever.”

Here Smith’s claim that there’s no point to thinking about joy is belied by her own acute intellectual analysis and assessment. She draws an important conceptual distinction between joy and pleasure (the subject that is the focus of pleasure is lost in joy) and makes a crucial normative judgment: the drug experience had no substantial meaning.

Smith’s idea that the subject is “lost” in joy might give Aquinas pause, since his view of experience, like that of many philosophers, is rooted in a sharp metaphysical distinction of subject and object. Still, in describing the highest level of charity (love of God), Aquinas speaks of “union” with God and even (citing St. Paul) “dissolving with Christ” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, 24, 9). Also, his mystical experiences toward the end of his life, which some say led Aquinas to abandon theological writing, might have opened him to Smith’s talk of loss of self.

At the same time, Aquinas would press Smith as to the basis for her judgment that her drug experience had, ultimately, no meaning, whereas her joy in “true love” is what makes her life worthwhile. Does she think that this judgment expresses just her idiosyncratic preference? Or does it tell us something about the right way to live a human life? Smith certainly seems to think that experiencing “true love” has taught her something that her younger clubbing self didn’t know. But this, Aquinas will point out, is just what he means by saying that joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, is what satisfies our rational desire — the desire to live as we ought.

Here Smith, like many contemporaries, may resist. At the end of her essay she says that joy “has very little real pleasure in it” and therefore poses a “new problem” rather than a solution. It is something she “now must find some way to live with daily.”

Why this uneasiness with her joy? Because it is as vulnerable as the persons who bring it. It’s bad enough, she says, that “the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you.” But then “why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” Joy, she says, “hurts just as much as it is worth”: the more the joy I find in love, the greater the loss I suffer when it’s gone. By contrast, “the end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone . . . and can always be replaced with another.” Unlike pleasures, people and the joy they bring, are irreplaceable. Her concluding thought is that “if we were sane and reasonable,” we would, like animals, always “choose a pleasure over a joy.”

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For Smith, then, the choice of joy is unreasonable, even insane — although nonetheless right. But Aquinas would ask how a choice that was right — that conformed to how a human being should live — could be unreasonable. It would seem, he might say, that Smith is confusing what is commonly taken as rational with what she has learned is really rational. In one standard sense, an act is rational to the extent that it helps bring about what you want to achieve. Aquinas notes that most people take bodily enjoyment as their ultimate goal: “the majority pursues corporeal pleasures.” To the common mind, therefore, it is rational to act for pleasure. But what Smith’s life has revealed to her is that most people are wrong about the goal of life: it is joy, not pleasure. She has, in effect, learned that acting for pleasure is not rational. Aquinas would also suggest that Smith is wrong to see human being as the only (or ultimate) source of joy. In his theological view, human loves needs to be grounded in and directed toward the eternal reality of a God who is identical with love.

I would not be surprised if Smith were uneasy with this seemingly facile response. She could question whether Aquinas’s confidence in reason might be an artifact of his medieval culture and whether reason means for us what it did for him. On the first issue, we would need to consult the historians, but on the second Smith’s penetrating and ironic novelist’s eye might lead to provocative suggestions.

Smith might also query Aquinas’s subordination of human to divine love. On the one hand, she could ask where in our experience we encounter this eternal love. On the other hand, she might argue that subordinating our love of one another to love of God undermines the specialness that makes human love so joyful.

In any case, Zadie Smith and Thomas Aquinas set us on the path to a long and fruitful conversation about joy.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.

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